“Going out afterward?” Carrie asked.
“Dinner with ——,” Sam said, naming a well-known artist. “Going home?”
“I told Big I’d cook him dinner.”
“That’s so cute. Cooking dinner,” Sam said.
“Yeah. Sure,” Carrie said. She mashed out her cigarette and went through a revolving door onto the street.
A RELATIONSHIP? HOW SILLY
Sam was having a big week. “Did you ever have one of those weeks when, I don’t know how to explain it, you walk into a room and every guy wants to be with you?” she asked Carrie.
Sam went to a party where she bumped into a guy she hadn’t seen for about seven years. He was one of those guys who, seven years ago, every woman on the Upper East Side had been after. He was handsome, came from a wealthy, connected family, dated models. Now, he said, he was looking for a relationship.
At the party, Sam let him back her into a corner. He’d had a few drinks. “I always thought you were so beautiful,” he said. “But I was scared of you.”
“Scared? Of me?” Sam laughed.
“You were smart. And tough. I thought you’d rip me to shreds.”
“You’re saying you thought I was a bitch.”
“Not a bitch. Just that I thought I wouldn’t be able to keep up.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I like it when men think I’m smarter than they are,” Sam said. “Because it’s usually true.”
They went to dinner. More drinks. “God, Sam,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m with you.”
“Why not?” Sam said, holding her cocktail glass high in the air.
“I kept reading about you in the papers. I kept wanting to get in touch with you. But I thought, She’s famous now.”
“I’m not famous,” Sam said. “I don’t even want to be famous,” and they started making out.
Sam touched his unmentionable, and it was a big one. A really big one. “There’s just something about those really, really big ones,” she said later to Carrie. “They make you want to have sex.”
“So did you?” Carrie asked.
“No,” Sam said. “He said he wanted to go home. Then he called the next day. He wants to have a relationship. Can you believe that? It’s just so silly.”
THE TALKING PARAKEET
Carrie and Mr. Big went to Carrie’s parents’ house for the weekend. In her house, everybody cooked. Mr. Big was making a beautiful effort to get along. “I’ll make the gravy,” he said.
“Don’t screw it up,” Carrie whispered as she walked by him.
“What’s wrong with my gravy? I make great gravy,” Mr. Big said.
“The last time you made it, you put whiskey or something in it, and it was terrible.”
“That was me,” her father said.
“Oh. So sorry,” Carrie said meanly. “I forgot.”
Mr. Big didn’t say anything. The next day, they went back to the city and had dinner with some of his friends. They were all couples who’d been married for years. Somebody started talking about parrots. How they’d had a parrot that talked.
“I went into a Woolworth’s once and bought a parakeet for ten bucks and taught it how to talk,” Mr. Big said.
“Parakeets can’t talk,” Carrie said.
“It talked,” Mr. Big said. “It said, ‘Hello Snippy.’ That was the name of my dog.”
In the car on the way home, Carrie said, “It couldn’t have been a parakeet. It must have been a mynah bird.”
“If I say it was a parakeet, it was a parakeet.”
Carrie snorted. “That’s stupid. Everyone knows that parakeets can’t talk.”
“It talked,” Mr. Big said. He lit up a cigar. They didn’t say anything the rest of the way home.
DON’T GO THERE
Carrie and Mr. Big went to the Hamptons for a weekend. It wasn’t quite spring yet, and it was depressing. They lit a fire. They read their books. They rented movies. Mr. Big would watch only action movies. Carrie used to watch them with him, but now she didn’t want to watch them anymore. “It’s a waste of time for me,” she said.
“So read,” Mr. Big said.
“I’m bored with reading. I’m going to take a walk.”
“I’ll take a walk with you,” Mr. Big said. “As soon as this movie is over.”
So she sat next to him and watched the movie and sulked.
They went to the Palm for dinner. She said something, and he said, “Oh, that’s stupid.”
“Really? How interesting. That you should call me stupid. Especially since I’m smarter than you,” Carrie said.
Mr. Big laughed. “If you think that, you’re really stupid.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Carrie said. She leaned across the table, suddenly so angry she didn’t even know who she was anymore. “If you fuck with me, I will make it my personal business to destroy you. And don’t think for a second that I won’t take a great deal of pleasure in doing it.”
“You don’t get up early enough to fuck with me,” Mr. Big said.
“I don’t need to. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” She wiped the corner of her mouth with her napkin. Don’t go there, she thought. Just don’t go there. Aloud she said, “I’m sorry. I’m just a little tense.”
The next morning, when they were back in the city, Mr. Big said, “Well, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Talk?” Carrie said. “You mean we’re not going to see each other this evening?”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Big said. “I think maybe we should take a little break, spend a couple of days apart until you get over this mood.”
“But I’m over it,” Carrie said.
She called him at work. He said, “I don’t know about things,” and she laughed and said, “Oh, come on, silly. Isn’t a person allowed to be in a bad mood? It’s not the end of the world. Relationships are like that sometimes. I said I was sorry.”
“I don’t want any hassles.”
“I promise I’ll be sweet. Aren’t I being sweet now? See? No more bad mood.”
“I guess so,” he said.
WHILE BIG’S AWAY
Time passed. Mr. Big went away on business for weeks. Carrie stayed in Mr. Big’s apartment. Stanford Blatch came over sometimes, and he and Carrie would act like they were two high schoolers whose parents had gone out of town: They smoked pot and drank whiskey sours and made brownies and watched stupid movies. They made a mess, and in the morning the maid would come in and clean it all up, getting down on her hands and knees to scrub the juice stains out of the white carpet.
Samantha Jones called a couple of times. She started telling Carrie about all these interesting, famous men she was meeting and all these great parties and dinners she was going to. “What are you doing?” she’d ask, and Carrie would say, “Working, just working.”
“We should go out. While Big’s away . . .” Sam said. But she never made concrete plans and after a couple of times, Carrie didn’t feel like talking to her. Then Carrie felt bad, so she called Samantha up and went to lunch with her. At first it was a good lunch. Then Sam started talking about all these movie projects and all these big cheeses she knew whom she was going to do business with. Carrie had her own project going, and Sam said, “It’s cute, you know. It’s a cute idea.”
Carrie said, “What’s so cute about it?”
“It’s cute. It’s light. You know. It’s not Tolstoy.”
“I’m not trying to be Tolstoy,” Carrie said. But of course, she was.
“So there you go,” Sam said. “Hey, I’ve known you forever. I should be able to tell you what I really think about something without you getting upset. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Really?” Carrie said. “I wonder.”
“Besides,” Sam said. “You’re probably going to marry Mr. Big and have kids. Come on. That’s what everybody wants.”
“Aren’t I lucky?” she said, and she picked up the check.
Mr. Big came back from his trip, and he and Carrie went to St. Barts for a long weekend.
The first night, she had a dream that Mr. Big was having an affair with a dark-haired girl. Carrie went to a restaurant and Mr. Big was with the girl, and the girl was sitting in Carrie’s chair and she and Mr. Big were kissing. “What is going on?” Carrie demanded.
“Nothing,” Mr. Big said.
“I want the truth.”
“I’m in love with her. We want to be together,” Mr. Big said.
Carrie had that old familiar feeling of hurt and disbelief. “Okay,” she said.
She went outside and into a field. Giant horses with golden bridles came out of the sky and down the mountain. When she saw the horses, she realized that Mr. Big and his feelings about her were not important.
She woke up.
“You had a bad dream?” Mr. Big said. “Come here.”
He reached out for her. “Don’t touch me!” she said. “I feel sick.”
The dream hung around for days afterward.
“What can I do?” Mr. Big said. “I can’t compete with a dream.” They were sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. The light from the sun was almost white.
“Do you think we talk enough?” Carrie asked.
“No,” Mr. Big said. “No, we probably don’t.”
They drove around and went to the beach and to lunch and talked about how beautiful it was and how relaxed they were. They exclaimed over a hen crossing the road with two newly hatched chicks, over a tiny eel caught in a tidal pool, over the dead rats that lay squished on the sides of the roads.
“Are we friends?” Carrie asked.
“There was a time when we really were friends. When I felt like you understood my soul,” Mr. Big said. They were driving on the narrow, curving, cement roads.
“A person can only make so much effort until they get tired or lose interest,” Carrie said.
They didn’t say anything for a while, then Carrie said: “How come you never say ‘I love you’?”
“Because I’m afraid,” Mr. Big said. “I’m afraid that if I say ‘I love you,’ you’re going to think that we’re going to get married.” Mr. Big slowed the car down. They went over a speed bump and passed a cemetery filled with brightly colored plastic flowers. A group of bare-chested young men were standing on the side of the road, smoking. “I don’t know,” Mr. Big said. “What’s wrong with the way things are right now?”
Later, when they were packing to go home, Mr. Big said, “Have you seen my shoes? Can you be sure to pack my shampoo?”
“No, and of course, darling,” Carrie said lightly. She went into the bathroom. In the mirror, she looked good. Tan and slim and blond. She began packing up her cosmetics. Toothbrush. Face cream. His shampoo was still in the shower, and she decided to ignore it. “What if I got pregnant?” she thought. She wouldn’t tell him and she’d secretly have an abortion and never talk to him again. Or she would tell him and have the abortion anyway and never talk to him again. Or she would have the kid and raise it up on her own, but that could be tricky. What if she hated him so much for not wanting to be with her that she ended up hating the kid?
She went into the bedroom and put on her high heels and straw hat. It was custom made and it cost over five hundred dollars. “Oh darling . . .,” she said.
“Yes?” he asked. His back was turned. He was putting things in his suitcase.
She wanted to say, “That’s it, dear. It’s over. We’ve had a great time together. But I always feel it’s better to end things on a high note. You do understand . . . ?”
Mr. Big looked up. “What?” he said. “Did you want something, baby?”
“Oh, nothing,” Carrie said. “I just forgot your shampoo, that’s all.”
“HE’S JUST A CREEP”
Carrie drank five bloody mary’s on the plane, and they fought all the way home. In the airport. In the limo. Carrie didn’t shut up until he said, “Do you want me to drop you off at your place? Is that what you want?” When they got to his apartment, she called her parents. “We got into a big fight,” she said. “He’s just a creep. Like all men.”
“Are you all right?” her father asked.
“Oh, I’m great,” she said.
Then Mr. Big was nice. He made her get into pyjamas and sat with her on the couch. “When I first met you, I liked you,” he said. “Then I liked you a lot. Now I . . . I’ve grown to love you.”
“Don’t make me vomit,” Carrie said.
“Why me, baby?” he asked. “With all the guys you’ve gone out with, why do you want to pick me?”
“Who said I did?”
“What is this, a pattern?” Mr. Big said. “Now that I’m more involved, you want to bail. You want to run away. Well, I can’t do anything about that.”
“Yes, you can,” Carrie said. “That’s the whole point.”
“I don’t get it,” Mr. Big said. “How is our relationship different from all the others you’ve had?”
“It’s not. It’s just the same,” Carrie said. “So far, it’s just sufficient.”
The next morning, Mr. Big was his usual cheery self and it was annoying. “Help me pick out a tie, baby,” he said, the way he always did. He brought five ties over to where Carrie was still trying to sleep, turned on the light, and handed her her glasses. He held the ties up to his suit.
Carrie glanced at them briefly. “That one,” she said. She threw off the glasses and lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
“But you hardly even looked at them,” Mr. Big said.
“That’s my final decision,” she said. Besides, in the end, isn’t one tie very much like another?”
“Oh. You’re still mad,” Mr. Big said. “I don’t get it. You should be happy. After last night, I think things are a lot better.”
HOME SWEET HOME
“The baby’s starving and the nanny left and I’m broke,” Amalita said on the phone. “Bring some pizza, won’t you, sweetpea, just two or three slices with pepperoni, and I’ll pay you back later.”
Amalita was staying in a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side. It was one of those side streets Carrie knew too well: dirty brick buildings with narrow entranceways littered with takeout menus from Chinese restaurants, and on the streets, grubby people walking scruffy dogs, and in the summer, obese women sitting out on the stoops. For a long time, Carrie had thought she’d never get away from it. She bought the pizza at the same place where she always used to buy pizza, near where she’d lived for four years when she was broke. It was still the same guy with the dirty fingers making the pizza and his little wife who never said anything working the cash register.
Amalita’s apartment was at the top of four rickety flights of stairs, in the back. One of those places where someone had tried to make the best of the exposed cinderblock walls and failed. “Well,” Amalita said. “It’s temporary. The rent is cheap. Five hundred a month.”
Her daughter, a beautiful little girl with dark hair and huge blue eyes, sat on the floor in front of a pile of old newspapers and magazines turning the pages.
“Well!” Amalita said. “I never heard from Righty. After he wanted me to go on tour with him and after I sent him a book he wanted me to send him. These guys don’t want a girl who’s a great fuck. Or even a good fuck. They want a girl who’s a bad fuck.”
“I know,” Carrie said.
“Look! Mama!” the girl said proudly. She pointed to a photo of Amalita at Ascot in a picture hat with Lord somebody or other.
“A Japanese businessman wanted to set me up in an apartment,” Amalita said. “You know, I detest that kind of thing, but the truth is, I’m temporarily broke. The only reason I was considering doing it was for the baby. I’m trying to get her into a preschool, and I need money to pay for it. So I said yes. Two weeks pass and I haven’t heard from him. Not a peep. So that just goes to show.”
Amalita sat on the couch in her sweatpants, tearing off pieces of pizza. Carrie sat on a narrow wooden chair. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with yellow stains under the armpits. Both girls had greasy hair. “When I look back in retrospect,” Amalita said, “I think, I shouldn’t have slept with this guy, I shouldn’t have slept with that guy. Maybe I should have done things differently.”
She paused. “I know you’re thinking about leaving Mr. Big. Don’t. Hold on to him. Of course, you’re beautiful, and you should have a million guys calling you up, wanting to be with you. But you and I, we know the truth. We know something about real life, don’t we?”
“Mama!” the little girl said. She held up a magazine, pointing to a photo spread of Amalita: She was wearing a white Chanel ski suit on the slopes of St. Moritz, then getting out of a limo at a Rolling Stones concert, smiling demurely in a black suit and pearls next to a senator.
“Carrington! Not now,” Amalita said, with mock severity. The little girl looked at her and giggled. She threw the magazine into the air.
It was a sunny day. The sun streamed in through the dirty windows. “Come here, sweetpea,” Amalita said. “Come here and have some pizza.”
“Hello, I’m home,” Mr. Big said.
“Hello,” Carrie said. She went to the door and kissed him. “How was the cocktail party?”
“Fine, fine.”
“I’m making dinner.”
“Good. I’m so glad we don’t have to go out.”
“Me too,” she said.
“Want a drink?” he asked.
“No thanks,” she said. “Just maybe a glass of wine with dinner.”
She lit candles, and they sat in the dining room. Carrie sat up very straight in her chair. Mr. Big talked on and on about some deal he was in the middle of doing, and Carrie stared at him and nodded and made encouraging noises. But she wasn’t really paying attention.
When he was finished talking, she said: “I’m so excited. The amaryllis finally bloomed. It has four flowers.”
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